Chinese Ghost Brides
In China several men, Yang Dongyan, Liu Shengbao, Hui Haibao and a spooky undertaker named Li Longsheng have recently been arrested for murdering women. Their excuse for murdering these unfortunate females was that they wanted to make fast money. It turns out that these women were more valuable dead than alive and in China where men out number women, desperate measures are being enacted by some people to procure these ghost brides. Now this in itself is not unusual as murders occur everyday, but the reason these women were murdered was for a truly strange tradition that dates back two thousand years.
In China people have long indulged in what is commonly known as ancestor worship. Ancestor worship is a tradition that reverberates through many aspects of Chinese life. Indeed, a Chinese festival known as Tomb Sweeping Day is when families visit the graves of their dead ancestors to clean them and burn incense. Spirits are believed to live on in the afterlife and at funerals people burn money and imitations of houses, cars and other goodies that the dead may need. It is believed by many, especially superstitious or uneducated people, that an unmarried life is incomplete, leading to the practice of minghun — burying single sons with recently dead young women to provide them with a wife in the afterlife. Unfortuantely this forbidden and ancient practice has been used as an excuse for murder by these men seeking to alleviate the fears of desperate families seeking brides for their unfortunate sons.
Parents of a deceased daughter often regard the money received in selling her for minghun as recompense for the dowry that they did not receive in her lifetime, while also posthumously elevating their child’s place in a patriarchal society. Wow, I feel truly sorry for such women who become ghost brides.